For next week's tutorial and practice-as-research, collect and find some collage materials
(old paper, tickets, envelopes, photographs, newspapers, magazines, comics)
Read about collage and photomontage within the art movements Dada, Surrealism, Cubism and Futurism. Look at the work of Paul Klee, Edward Lear and Hannah Hoch. Look at the quotes below and think about how you could start to apply the thinking processes she uses to your own work.
Handout: Using Absurdity, collage and textural interest
1) Using Fanelli’s technique of photographed and photocopied eyes on colour backgrounds, create a simple collaged image of a strange
person or creature, designed to appeal to children.
- You can add simple brush drawing in gouache
or ink, add quotations, notes or words, or punctuation marks.
2) Nonsense drawing generator
Photocopy some drawings from your
sketchbooks. Fold the photocopies so that only part of the drawing is visible. Lay
one drawing over another to create a surreal combination and either trace or
photocopy the result.
Create an absurd drawing by using the surrealist game “Exquisite
Corpse”.
Fold a piece of paper horizontally: one fold
for each person playing the game.
Draw a design in the top section and just
over the edge of the next fold.
Fold your drawing under so it is hidden, pass
the paper to the next person, and ask them to repeat this step.
When a round of drawings has been completed,
open the paper to reveal the composite drawing and display it.
Fanelli methodologies:
Photocollage using eyes: This references avant-garde art, and also adds a recognizable human
element that acts as an “anchor” to what might be too cold and abstract a
composition – Remember the “adding an eye to a blob” trick
Textural interest: By using found materials that have their own semiotic messages, Fanelli
adds narrative depth and also makes the image more interesting
Scribbles and notation : Using apparent changes of mind, thoughts, notes and scribbles, Fanelli
references many contemporary artists. Such artists and illustrators include
Sigmar Polke, David Shrigley, Paul Davis, Donna Muir and Su Huntley, Ivan
Chermayeff, Sue Coe and Oliver Jeffers.) By doing this Fanelli makes her work
both more accessible to children, (who appreciate mistakes and imperfection and
can relate to these aspects in their artwork, schoolwork and rough books) and
adults who find the imperfections and avant-garde feel give the work an air of
postmodern sophistication.
Absurd anthropomorphism - like Edward Lear
By anthropomorphising unexpected things like chairs and cutlery at
a sophisticated level - (of detail and behaviour, not just making them talk)
Fanelli delights children by surprising them and being absurdly (unconventionally)
funny.
http://www.hellerbooks.com/pdfs/varoom_03.pdf
‘The second clue comes in the scribbles and
handwriting which are hallmarks of her style, creating an immediacy which gives
the impression that the author is thinking aloud on paper. ‘Scribbles,’ says
Sara, ‘often have a visual function – they appear where I want some energy in
the picture, but not too dominant. One can imagine anything about them –
something might have just gone up in smoke or something is moving so fast that
you see only its trajectory.’ And on handwriting: ‘ I like using letter shapes
and their weight as elements of the picture, so I use the typography as parts
of the construction of the layout right from the first planning of the page.’
But the scribbles and the handwriting are
also a physical manifestation of Sara’s ability to span the worlds of both
adults and children’. Gill Robins, http://booksforkeeps.co.uk/issue/195/childrens-books/articles/the-dream-like-images-of-sara-fanelli
"With her
compositions always based on line and shape (no use of tone), Fanelli's
favoured medium is collage, which she has developed in a very personal way. She
took it up not just as a way of moving on from the flat colours she'd always
used in her paintings, but also to make use of a vast collection of bits and
pieces - she has a serious collecting habit, especially of early 20th-century stationery and associated ephemera - stamps,
decorative letter headings, embossed labels, price tags, envelopes with
intricately patterned linings, postmarks and paper from every imaginable kind
of exercise book (graph paper in particular lends itself to the scale on which
she works).
Everything
in her collages has had a previous life. Sweet papers are crinkled and torn,
newsprint is yellowed: every mark, every
stain has its own story to tell, and she interweaves these stories with her own
narratives. Given a new life on the page, the often disparate and initially
rather static elements of the collage take on a new significance: they may be
veiled in nostalgia, they may be bafflingly obscure, but the irresistible
details, the textures, the curious, often surreal, juxtapositions soon begin to
reveal different layers of meaning, inviting and rewarding hours of
investigation." Joanna Carey, the guardian
Interview with Stephen Heller, Varoom journal no.3:
http://www.hellerbooks.com/pdfs/varoom_03.pdf
Guardian article by Joanna Carey
Sara Fanelli website
http://www.sarafanelli.com
Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for A Theory of the Emotions (1962)
The magical is one of the many ways we have of seeing the world. It is an inferior, more primitive way than the way of seeing which is normal to us in our practical life. " Emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes abruptly, and the world of magic appears in its place". (Introduction, p xv)
Jean-Paul Sartre, Sketch for A Theory of the Emotions (1962)
The magical is one of the many ways we have of seeing the world. It is an inferior, more primitive way than the way of seeing which is normal to us in our practical life. " Emotion arises when the world of the utilizable vanishes abruptly, and the world of magic appears in its place". (Introduction, p xv)
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